Radnor Lake would be considered part of the Western Highland Rim Forest
If thousands of trees grow together, covering hillsides and hollows, at what point do they become a forest?
A small group of well-connected Nashvillians has spent the past few years learning exactly how difficult it is to answer that question. Most recently, lead volunteer Judson Newbern is after a Wikipedia page.
“The wooded hills around the western border of Nashville actually constitute a continuous forest that extends into surrounding counties,” Newbern tells the Scene. “This turns out to be a part of the ‘Western Highland Rim Forest.’ We want to give that portion that falls within Davidson County a name and to make sure it is recognized. Forests with a name on [them] get more respect than undifferentiated woodlands.”
The Alliance to Conserve Nashville’s Highland Rim Forest came together 18 months ago and counts former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, environmental attorney (and Dean’s wife) Delta Anne Davis, StyleBlueprint co-founder Elizabeth Fox and longtime conservationist Kathleen Williams among its tight-knit leadership. Newbern led major real estate and campus expansion projects at Vanderbilt for more than 30 years. The group promotes its partnership with nearly every Nashville environmental nonprofit — and there are a lot — but currently coalesces around its own two-pronged strategy: Brand the forest, then save it.
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Sun, oxygen and rain have already done the hard work required to grow the vast canopy across the Western Highland Rim, geologists’ name for the cuesta that cradles Middle Tennessee. State documents refer to the area’s woods in plural, as forests rather than one contiguous entity. The “Western Highland Rim Forests” were listed among 20 “Conservation Opportunity Areas” in the Tennessee Wildlife Action Plan, a comprehensive document from 2015 that emphasizes areas across the state for conservation. Newbern and his fellow advocates have seized on the slice that falls within Davidson County, determining that Nashville has “the world’s largest urban forest within the limits of any city of 500,000.” (The population qualifier is necessary to distinguish from the densely forested Sitka, Alaska.) They want the rest of us to see a forest in the trees. Securing an article from another news source would help with the Wikipedia article, Newbern tells me — another small action toward the larger goal.
Maps suggest the overarching forest’s boundaries could span more than 10 counties from Joelton to Pulaski. In Davidson County, the Western Highland Rim Forest would unite Beaman, Bells Bend, Percy Warner and Radnor Lake parks. Formal recognition is a semantics dance that can confer rights, respect, power and protection.
“Our thinking is that, if you are a property owner and you see the city marketing ‘Nashville’s Highland Rim Forest,’ you start noticing that it’s right where you live,” Newbern says. “ We’re totally up against developers, a lot of them who aren’t even in Nashville anymore, who have the inside track here. No one is standing them down.”
Newbern begins our interview describing the group’s focus on the potential tourism and economic benefits of conserving this specific forest, explaining the need to protect mature trees in tandem with planting new ones and explicitly distancing the alliance from other “tree-huggers.” The group treads lightly around any political triggers that could hinder progress or generate backlash throughout state or local agencies. By the end of our interview, Newbern shares a motivating fear — that one day he would be on his deathbed ashamed he didn’t do more to protect a world ravaged by environmental destruction.
Branding the trees that pass by outside the car window on Highway 100 is a psychological strategy to change people’s minds. The Western Highland Rim Forest’s chief vulnerability is that the vast majority of its acreage lies within private property lines. Individual property owners with individual concerns will make individual decisions about individual trees; all these taken together, and the forest lives or it dies.
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Deforestation, primarily by clear-cutting plots for building, threatens the forest with slow death. Developers have aimed specifically at northwest Nashville in recent years to find more — and cheaper — land. Builders have strong-armed the city and state to loosen regulations and prevent new ones. A dire housing crunch, in which limited supply keeps prices skyward, adds even more public pressure for building and associated project approvals. Directing the public consciousness to Nashville’s backyard forest helps facilitate the alliance’s more difficult maneuver: signing legal agreements with property owners to protect the forest in perpetuity.
The alliance directs interested property owners to TennGreen Land Conservancy, the nonprofit founded by Williams in 1998. Conservation easements are binding agreements to restrict certain uses like future development, resource extraction or subdividing property into smaller parcels. TennGreen estimates they have about 60 across the state, including one agreement protecting 1,400 acres of the Western Highland Rim Forest south of Nashville.
“The current landowner still owns their property, but often they have a special connection to their land or longtime memories there,” says Alice Hudson Pell, TennGreen’s executive director. “Conservation easements are one tool in the toolkit.”
